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In their place emerged Jugo-Slavia the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes implied by the South Slav Parliamentary Club in Austria in their Declaration of May 30, 1917, and formulated by the Pact of Corfu of July 7, 1917, which Pasié, premier of Serbia, and Trumbié, the head of the London Jugo-Slav Committee, drew up. The evolution had been completed.
When I left Paris for the Adriatic I carried with me the impression, as the result of conversations with members of the various peace delegations, that the people of Montenegro were almost unanimously in favor of annexation to Serbia, thereby becoming a part of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
It is a criminal offence, and propagandists are liable to swift arrest. No discrimination of any kind will be made against subjects of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes on the ground of race. Serbia by herself has not a large educated class.
Then, too, the Croatians, Serbs, Slovenes, and Slovaks were unhappy at being ruled, first by the Hungarians and then by the emperor, as they were Slavic peoples who wished their independence.
Whatever value we may set upon the Christianity of the Slovenes, Herzegovinians, Bulgarians and Roumanians, we certainly cannot call them heathens. They belong to the Roman Catholic, to the Greek, or to the Greek United Church, although their worship and religious conceptions are strongly tinged with reminiscences of Slavic paganism. Neither is a conquest, in the military sense, possible.
Among the Slovenes, politics degenerated into the struggle for minor concessions from the court at Vienna in regard to the Slovene language and schools, while political parties multiplied freely through personal and social differences. The lines which bound them to their kinsmen in the south were weakest during this period.
But I very much doubt if the Croats, the Slovenes, the Bosnians and the Montenegrins will willingly consent to a permanent arrangement whereby the new nation is placed under a Serbian dynasty, no matter how complete are the safeguards afforded by the constitution or how conscientious and fair-minded the sovereign himself may be.
The Croats, like the Slovenes, adopted Roman Catholicism, the Latin alphabet, and the culture of Rome. The Serbs accepted Greek Orthodoxy, the Cyrillic alphabet, and the culture of Constantinople.
She cannot forget that the Austrian and Hungarian fractions of the new Jugoslav people in other words, the Slovenes and Croats were the most faithful subjects of the Dual Monarchy, fighting for the Hapsburgs with a ferocity and determination hardly surpassed in the war.
This division was therefore the result of forces created by man and changeable by him. The Croats settled in the northwestern half of the territory south of the Slovenes; the Serbs roughly in the southeastern part of it. Here geographical influences the direction of the rivers and the Dinaric ridges combined with divergent political and economic possibilities, produced a dualism.
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